by John Burdett
“Okay, right, boys, policy change. We have to go buy our own Viagra. How about we do that, freshen up, raid the minibars, smoke a few spliffs, and come back ready to rock and roll?”
Whoops of joy at this magic phrase. It is only when they have all trooped out that I notice the stranger who must have slipped in when my back was turned. In his early twenties, big, broad-shouldered, long black pants, polished black shoes, stark white shirt, an intensity to his gaze that could be mistaken for a permanent frown. Not exactly a typical customer, especially when you take into account the black hair, pencil mustache, and brown skin.
All the girls have gone to their lockers now that the gang has left. He and I are the only ones in the bar. I switch the music back to Chopin.
The newcomer seems not to notice the distillation of high genius that emerges from the sound system in the form of infinitely tumbling and rising piano notes. He orders a can of Coke and sits on one of the stools at the bar. He looks at me, Thai to Thai.
“You’re a pimp?” the stranger says in a tone of surprise, too innocent to be insulting. I do not bother to explain the technical difference between what I do and what a pimp does.
Despite the frown, he is a handsome fellow, somewhat thickset for Thai genes. He makes no secret of his contempt for those aging punks—or for me. He glances around at the pictures of Elvis, Sinatra, et cetera, with a sneer. I find it hard to meet the purity of his gaze.
“American,” he says in a neutral tone. He knows I will not mistake his meaning.
I respond with a smile, raise my hands: what can you do?
He catches sight of the Buddha above the cash register and connects him to me with a sweep of his eyes. “They told me you were Buddhist—I mean a real one, not a superstitious peasant.”
“Did they?”
He wants to say more (perhaps he is a little young for his age—his kind often are), but his silence is judgment enough. To tell the truth, I’m caught off guard. The last time I saw such religious sincerity was in a monastery, but this is no Buddhist monk. In the near-empty bar I find myself looking around with his eyes. Not particularly uplifting, I guess, a tad too earthy for a pure soul. (But then look what pure souls have done to the earth, I remind myself.) I refuse the unspoken invitation to repent, and we are in a kind of silent standoff that I do not believe he can win (my bar, my street, my country, my religion—I belong to the majority here), when he fishes in the pocket of his pants to pull out a piece of A4 paper, folded into four. He spreads it out on the bar, watching my expression carefully. It is a digital picture of the farang Chanya murdered. I’m not able to control the flash of paranoia that passes across my face. The Muslim notes and records my wild-eyed moment, but there is no opportunity for explanation or discussion because the rest of the girls have begun to arrive, one by one.
7
Homer listed ships. Should I not similarly honor the vessels of our salvation on the wine-dark sea of market forces?
Nat: Most of the girls keep their work clothes in lockers at the back of the bar, but Nat likes to dress up before she arrives. She claims it’s because she needs time to work her way into her role, but Chanya once told me she tries to find customers on the sky train on her way to work. It’s true she calls in sick more than the others, usually just when she would have been on the sky train on her way to us. That’s okay, every girl has her idiosyncrasies, which probably make her unemployable in most professions. Look at Chanya, for example. In the circumstances, what other employer would have been so forgiving?
Marly: At twenty-seven, Marly is one of our smartest practitioners. Like most true professionals, she sees repeat business as the best way of evening out the violent sine curves of the trade, and that means setting her sights on the middle-aged and older. The charms of younger customers are more than offset by gentleness, generosity, fatherly kindness, wealth, and a tendency in the aged to go to sleep early, thus leaving her free for a little moonlighting should she need the dough.
Lalita is in an asymmetrical YSL fake in black with dipping back and plunging cleavage, revealing her beautifully enhanced bosom—tastefully done by a skilled surgeon, nothing too exaggerated. She is very gifted and has already built a fine two-story house with carport on a piece of land in her home village. Last week her earnings permitted her to purchase two more water buffalo for her parents to rent out. Her opening line to all newcomers: “I loved you from the moment I saw you walk through the door.” I still smile to myself at how often it seems to work.
Wan and Pat, close friends, are wearing identical hot pants with tit-hugging tank tops and high heels. They are not from Isaan, which is in the Northeast, but Chiang Mai province in the far Northwest, where the weather is cooler and the opium fresher. They come from a hill village belonging to the Hmong tribe, where they grew up expert in poppy cultivation. When compulsory crop substitution made them redundant, they graciously switched vices to enable their families to make up for the reduced income. They plan to open a beauty salon in Chiang Mai as soon as they’ve scraped the money together.
Om, with a naturally boyish figure, has cut off her denims at the crotch and leaves cotton strings wherever she sits. She is from Phuket, where tourism has made everyone rich. She grew up without want but got bored with the family minimarket and came to Krung Thep in search of adventure. For her, prostitution is mostly a sport in which the huntress uses charm, guile, and the power of sex. The object is for the john to voluntarily transfer the cash in his wallet to her purse without noticing what a sucker he is.
Ay is in a bikini and high heels, revealing the silver insert in her navel at the center of her flat brown stomach, not to mention the leaping swordfish whose sword peaks just above her panty line. She is a true child of Isaan, where she grew up unlettered. As is often the case with the illiterate, she owns a photographic memory and never fails to recall a john’s name, even if she hasn’t seen him for a year: a powerful charm in this line of work.
Here is Bon. She is more global than the others. She uses us as a base but prefers the more lucrative destinations of Tokyo, Singapore, and Hong Kong. She is a visa expert and offers free advice to any of the girls thinking of relocating overseas. Her English is all but perfect, and I’m told her Japanese is not half bad. She runs her own web page, which brings her a certain amount of work and enables her to keep up with her foreign customers. Way ahead of the curve, she owns her own small business in her home village that her mother manages.
Ah now, here is one of my favorites. Urn is from the poorest part of Isaan, next to the Cambodian border, a genuine country girl who will not defile her identity by learning to read and write or by learning English beyond the skeletal vocabulary necessary for trade. She is slightly flat-footed from a childhood spent in the rice paddy and likes to roll her trousers up to her calves as if she were wading through a swamp. She is reflexively superstitious and never omits to wai the Buddha or to take her shoes off when she enters the bar—for which the others never cease to tease her. She speaks Thai with a hayseed accent and a maximum of vulgarity. She also owns an exceptional figure and a brilliant smile, so she does not starve.
Su: nothing special to look at, but both my mother and I are in awe of her true Thai indolence. As an experiment the other day, I sent a missionary over to her. (We get them from time to time: white shirt, black tie with tiny knot, the sad courtesy of the professional sin-buster, Bible in quick-release shoulder holster—I’m afraid they all look the same to me, the men and the women.)
Missionary to Su: “Whatever you earn, I’ll pay you the same for cleaning my condominium every morning.”
Su (threatened, conflicted, and distressed): “Couldn’t we just fuck?”
Farang, tell your evangelists not to bundle salvation with the work ethic. It really doesn’t play in the tropics. Even the Muslims and the Catholics know better than that, and we Buddhists have bagged ninety percent of the market by peddling inertia for two and a half millennia.
Sonja: she is not with
us anymore, but in her day she was quite the most beautiful girl in the street, a small star-shaped scar on her left cheek notwithstanding. (Motorbike: ninety percent of the scarring on Thai flesh is due to taking a corner too fast while drunk.) Her life changed when she saw a B movie starring Ronald Reagan in which the heroine, also scarred, came out with the immortal line, which Sonja immediately committed to memory: “Oh, how can any man love me when I am so hideously disfigured?” The ploy proved so fetching, she had to produce a short list of suitors, which consisted of an Englishman, an American, and a Chinaman.
The Englishman: “But darling, it only makes me love you all the more.”
The American: “Come to the States, I’ll have someone take care of it.”
The Chinaman: “I want a ten percent discount.”
Naturally, having been trained by my mother, Sonja chose the man most likely to make a fortune in this lifetime and went to live happily ever after in Shanghai with the Chinaman. (It’s your system, farang.)
And so on. Not a one of them whose combination of calculation and naÏveté could not defeat the hardest of asses—unless the hardass has God on his side, of course. The dark young stranger has not ceased to squirm and sneer since the girls came trooping in. The moment is saved by the Australian, thank Buddha, who trips on the threshold with his habitual curse.
8
Slim and wiry, about thirty-six, his inevitable name is Greg, and he has been a regular these past two months. He sits next to Ay, who immediately and expertly shifts on the stool so she can hook a leg over Greg’s walking shorts. Greg appears not to notice.
“Gimme a Foster’s, Sonchai.” A cock of the head. “Thirsty weather, mate.”
“You buy me drink,” Ay says.
“Do I know you?”
“Yes.”
“Better give her one, Sonchai.”
The young Muslim is watching.
Ay finishes her tequila in one, then sucks on the salt-encrusted lime. Nobody knows what swarthy fellow in a sombrero first introduced our working girls to tequila (okay, it was probably a Chinese entrepreneur), but history will reveal this act of marketing genius in its true glory.
“You pay bar?” Ay wants to know, now massaging Greg’s member, which has begun visibly to swell under his shorts. The dark stranger turns away in visceral disgust to stare at the wall.
“Let’s go back to my hotel—at least there’s enough space to turn around in.” He takes a five-hundred-baht note out of his wallet and holds it up to the light. “Or maybe we’ll have a few more, what d’you say?”
Ay plucks the note from his fingers with amazing speed and hands it to me. I raise my eyebrows in a question to Greg. “Yeah, may as well, the kid’s right, I’ll only be too shit-faced later, probably make an arsehole of myself.” Looking at his fly. “Christ Ay, what you been doing down there while I’ve been having an intellectual conversation with Sonchai here?”
On his slim figure the protuberance is somewhat dramatic, drawing the interest of the other girls, all of whom want to measure the circumference and check for hardness. “Big banana,” Lalita confirms among the oohs and aahs of the others. “I hope you gentle with her.”
The Muslim grinds his jaw.
“What about me? I’m just a poor little Australian farang all alone in your big hard city.”
“You hard, not city.”
Greg bursts out laughing. “You can’t win.” A quick glance at the Muslim, then away. Greg catches my eye, I shake my head. Silence.
“I go change,” Ay says.
We all watch her backside under the bikini bottom as she walks down the bar on her high heels. Except the Muslim. The atmosphere starts to congeal.
Fortunately, Ay’s “dressing” was a simple matter of slipping on a skirt and T-shirt. Now she is back, and Greg has already paid for the drinks and her bar fine. “See you later,” he calls out.
The Muslim watches the couple’s exit with exquisite disdain.
Now the bald giant and his gang burst in, filling the bar. Hardly an improvement, I guess, from Allah’s point of view.
“Hey, Sonchai, what you do to the sounds, man? That stuff is about a thousand years old.”
I switch to the Moody Blues, “Nights in White Satin.”
“Better.”
I shift my attention to deal with this gang. They are in a fairly manageable state at the moment, but old men of this tribe require ceaseless vigilance. Fortunately more girls have begun to arrive—Marly, Kat, Pinung et al.—until there is one for each old man, who feels honor bound to show appreciation and virility by cooing and slobbering all over them. The girls, laughing, hardly have time to change. Their drinks are waiting for them when they return from their lockers, and I have to make a call to order more tequila.
Everyone knocks back their drinks except for me and the stranger, who purses his lips. He has refolded the picture, and I’m wondering why he remains sitting here when the old men so obviously get on his nerves. I’m deeply worried now, because I’m having one of my flashes.
I’ll have to explain. We were teenagers when my best friend and soul brother Pichai killed our yaa baa dealer. Our mothers arranged for us to spend a year at a monastery in the far North, run by a highly respected abbot who happens to be Vikorn’s elder brother. Pichai was killed in the cobra case (op. cit.) last year, by the way.
Twelve months of intensive meditation in that forest monastery changed both of us in a way that is impossible for nonmeditators to understand. Ever since, I have experienced flashes of insight into the past lives of others. Sometimes the information is precise and easy to interpret, but most of the time it consists of rather vague phantasmagoric glimpses of another person’s inner life. This Muslim’s is something else, something so rare in Bangkok, I’m in shock. I’m almost certain of it: we met at the great Buddhist University at Nalanda, India, oh, about seven hundred years ago. I have to admit he’s kept his glow.
From the corner of my eye, I see him put some money down on the counter under his empty Coke can and disappear out the door.
Light dawns somewhere in the bald giant’s brain. He remembers that Lalita knows how to jive.
“ ‘Jailhouse Rock,’ ” he yells.
The girls all remember from last time. “Yeah, Sonchai, give him Elvis.”
We start with “Blue Suede Shoes,” go on to “Jailhouse Rock,” “Nothing but a Hound Dog,” and most of the others. A few of the old men pick their partners and start to jive. We’re all clapping them on with plenty of oohs and aahs and whoops. Now the bald giant declares in a shout that all the old folk took a couple of Viagra each about half an hour ago. Screams of hilarity from the girls, who like to check and discuss the mysterious and creeping tumescence with their owners and with one another. The old folk’s vacation has hit the sweet spot: This is really living beams on those craggy old faces.
When I return to the spot where the Muslim was sitting, I see he has left exactly the cost of the Coke, plus a card with a telephone number and address, plus that photograph of Chanya’s victim neatly folded.
“Jai dum” is Marly’s comment as she passes by the empty stool where the stranger sat and scowls at it. Black heart.
By now the playlist has progressed to the slow tunes. Elvis is singing “Love Me Tender,” and the ex-hippies are holding their partners close, clinging more than hugging.
“Old men,” Marly whispers to me in Thai. “Dead soon.”
9
At the beginning of this kalpa, three men traveled together, a Christian, a Muslim, and a Buddhist. They were good friends, and when they discussed spiritual matters, they seemed to agree on all points. Only when they turned their gaze on the outer world did their perceptions differ. One day they passed over a mountain ridge to behold a fertile and populated valley below.
“How strange,” said the Christian. “In Village One down there the villagers are all fast asleep, whereas in Village Two they are lost in a hideous orgy of sin.”
“You are
quite wrong,” said the Muslim, “in Village One everyone is in a perpetual state of ecstasy, whereas in Village Two everyone is asleep.”
“Idiots,” said the Buddhist. “There is only one village and only one set of villagers. They are dreaming themselves in and out of existence.”
10
The address on the Muslim’s card is of an apartment building a few minutes’ walk away, but there is nothing I can do while the old men are waiting for the miracle of medical science to rescue them from impotence, a period the girls see as a window of opportunity to persuade their increasingly ardent suitors to buy them more lady drinks. (The bar and the girls cut the profits of the drinks fifty-fifty—some girls prefer to make their money that way.) One by one the old codgers take their paramours to the rooms upstairs (we charge five hundred baht for two hours) or back to their hotels.
I’m now too preoccupied with the stranger’s card and the photograph of Mitch Turner to think of anything else. It is ten minutes to midnight by the clock on the fax machine, but I decide to try the number on the card anyway. Someone lifts the receiver on the first ring. The salutation, in a dialect from the deep South, is spoken softly, almost in a whisper. Not the voice of the young stranger: there is power and age in the tone I hear now, and the habit of authority.
“This is—”
He switches to standard Thai: “Yes, we know who it is. We were hoping you would do us the honor of coming to see us.”
A pause. “I’m scared.”
“I understand,” the old man says, somehow managing to convey compassion over the telephone line. “What guarantee can we offer that would reassure you?” Although obviously older than me, he uses a polite form of address normally reserved for youth when addressing age. In other words, he knows I’m a cop. Interesting and, in the circumstances, disturbingly subtle. Why do I get the feeling he’s smarter than me? “Would you like to bring a colleague? Of course, you can make a telephone call to inform Colonel Vikorn where you are going. We don’t really mind, although we would prefer not.”